


programmed cell death

by hanktalkin



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Hanahaki Disease, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 10:46:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19171702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanktalkin/pseuds/hanktalkin
Summary: Robots (Don't) Love





	programmed cell death

She coughs them up like shrapnel, like popcorn kernels stuck at the back of her throat, like shame that’s already killed her once.

They land in a pile outside the incineration plant, huddling together in a sticky mass as though they know they’re one hot wind away from being stolen out of existence. But the alleyway is alee, filtering the distant sun through layers of cable and catwalks, leaving Zarya hunched over the gore with hexagonal patches of warmth on her back. She stands, pushing herself off her knees as every titanium vertebrae pops, still staring down at the lump left beside the chute. Faeries are already starting to buzz about it, curiosity incarnate if there ever was one, pink and blue pulsations that match the spots over her vision.

“Zaryanova?”

The call comes distant, though not safely distant, words that mean  _where have you gone_  even if they don’t say as much. She gingerly wipes a string of bloody saliva off her chin.

The sound of footsteps through the ankle-deep trash is nearly undetectable, yet Zarya has trained her ears long enough to know the omnic’s approach. She straightens; she’d rather welcome death with open arms than let Lynx see her afflicted.

“It’s nothing,” she says, before they can ask. “We should return these to Volskaya.”

She grabs the bag of Reclaimed parts sagging against the asphalt, carelessly dropped in her disoriented dash toward privacy. Lynx tilts their head, but says nothing. This is the ideal: evidence of the flowers is hidden by the outward turn of her foot, and she maintains her image by obscuring theirs.

They pause, guarding their curiosity in a way a fae never could, and nod. Necessities acquired, they abscond. She is free to follow them out, the pile of red as forgotten and pointless as the rest of the city’s trash.

* * *

The cough is persistent, though not unexplainable. 

Reclaiming is a dangerous profession: she could have contracted any number of curses by stumbling about in the lower districts while searching for lost corporate property. Random spells set and long forgotten, the sorry attempt of a vengeful client; wayward magic is viscid and plentiful in humanities most fruitful breeding pool. It is just like humans to carefully cultivate what kills them. Even with all the wires and advancements humanity has achieved, she has to admit they are still a remarkably frail species.

This, however, had never stopped her. Reclaiming offers something, a modicum of power over her life that anyone from her background would be luck to have. She has no family left that will speak to her for it, but with the stack she grew up in long razed in a building collapse, that wasn’t a large group to begin with. The pay is well enough, and there is no guarantee that if she didn’t have it, she wouldn’t be in the lower districts as a permanent fixture.

Still, as much as she has carved out a niche for herself under Katya’s all-seeing gaze, it is nothing to the way Lynx takes to the role.

It is three years ago now that she met them, assigned when “murder investigator” had also somehow fallen into her job description. (Another Reclaimer, one of Katya’s favorites. Nothing of note if another corporation hadn’t been suspected.)  _Outside help_ , Katya had said, only for Zarya to find that her help was an  _omnic_  of all things, one who sensed her distaste within a few heartbeats of meeting. They were not human, not fae, but a _thing_ , a creature with no origin but the parts they were made of. Even the most augmented human had been a  _somebody_  at one point, but omnics…they were nothing.

Still, she put those feelings aside. Her job was clear, and if Katya believed an omnic could help, she would allow inspiration wherever it came. It was a good thing, for if she hadn’t, Lynx’s various surprises, (and the murderer) would never have presented themselves. Lynx is  _smart_ ; not just in the way a computer would be with encyclopedias hardwired into its core, but clever in ways that sneak up on nights underneath the advert boards. They know how to talk to people, to make witnesses feel at ease. Their hands are fast, their feet are faster. They glide through the city like a dancer, brisk and lithe as that from which they take their name. It is a marvel to watch; if Zarya is one thing, it is not fast.

After the first mission…somehow, they found themselves chasing the same tail once again. And, a month later, yet again.

“A small city,” Lynx commented after the fifth time, and thought themself funny.

Rain comes down in drips between the city levels, landing in rivers that reflect a neon advertisement for homemade love potions. While Lynx talks to a local, Zarya leans her back against a paper advert, hoping no security drone will come cite her for obscuring corporate estate. She watches Lynx trade a small palm pilot for a spell, and wonders if they’re better suited for this than she will ever be. Whatever nebulous concept makes up the soul of an omnic, it’s immune to the various diabolism that squalors in this place. Or at the very least, it’s resistant.

“It’s for tracking out target,” Lynx says, and it jerks her out stupor.

“What?” She straightens, back peeling away from wet paper.

“I assumed you were irritated we were stopping to shop.” They hold up the spell, flat and round, carved like sandstone and oh-so malignant. “If Chernobog is using dark magic, this will light up his trail like a blacklight in a brothel.”

She can’t help the snort that exits her, ragged and off-guard in a way she usually keeps herself from. There is a brief hesitation, but eventually she follows with, “hardly a trail when the whole room starts to glow.”

“Zaryanova!” they say, and they tilt swish their ears in a way that she’s come to know as their amusement. “That is highly inappropriate. We have a job to do here.”

“You are the one who-!” But then she hears them laughing, and suddenly so is she, yet again unable to stop what comes from within.

Still. As much as they make her smile, needle her, show her delight she hasn’t known since her family crumbled under the strain of this city, they turn their chin ahead, and her brows contract ever so slightly. She cannot hold their attention long, and she shouldn’t want to; an omnic is no substitute for a friend.

Yet.

She finds herself thinking often. Of Lynx. They speak freely on jobs to fill the silences she leaves behind, and it seems they lead quite a charmed life in all of this, somehow. They have hobbies, opinions on sports…people who call them friend. A life beyond whatever Volskaya’s whims have demanded for the day.

Sometimes she thinks they’re human than she’ll ever be. Next to them, what has she to offer? Nothing, not when she lacks those things to begin with. A hollow woman in an overstuffed city. An air bubble waiting to pop.

Lynx is talking again, and her mind begins to wander. Perhaps it is this, the carless unguardedness, that allows the gap in her defense.

“Excuse me,” she interrupts.

She turns, not missing the confusion in Lynx’s state as she all but runs down the first side street she finds.

There is no place in it that isn’t crowded with bodies, brownies and humans choosing this particular street corner to panhandle in the pouring rain. She runs a mental catalogue of dozen different augmentation copyright violations in this street alone, but it’s done without even thinking, the aching cough that wants to escape her body overriding higher thought. It jerks, twitching its reigns, and she falls against a steel wall with a cough. The kernels are germinating, hatching, exploding outwards until she hacks up the husks against the cold burnish.

The people of the street barely even look. She coughs up fistful after fistful of blood-soaked petals—sapping, sinking, sprouting, searing, shooting—until there’s nothing left of her except raw pain. Nothing left  _in_  her, though she knows—she  _knows_ —that’s not true. She breathes heavily, on her knees, head pressed against the cool metal while a sheen of sweat mixes with oily rain.

The attacks are getting frequent now, closer together. She cannot control what she can’t see, can’t fight what she can’t take with her fists. These things that have hexed her, and her denial is killing her.

She finds Lynx where she left them, pretending to examine various brands of disembodied thumb. The two of them carry on their way, and if Lynx notices the droplets of blood staining the sky blue polyester of her uniform, they are polite enough not to say.

* * *

She goes to find a witch.

They are many, but difficult to locate, like hiding in under city like it will save them from the high rise’s gaze. Although not technically illegal, their practices are considered an insult to those patented services, an intolerable alternative that refuses to abate. Her witch is smaller than she—human, if reluctantly—though well muscled under the denim vest. He lies her on a bed with sheets so white they looked like they never been touched, a block of glass suspended overhead, the lid to her coffin threatening to crush her with its mere existence.

The hut is crowded with scrap metal and small, mice-like droids that scurry in between dark corners that change beneath a swinging lamp. The witch applies balm to her wrists and neck. The room smells of apples.

He runs an x-ray. She spits up orange petals into a wooden bowl.

“Such is pride,” he notes rolls the bits of plant matter over in his palms. They are long and curled, amber except for the small black dots that pepper their surface. The blood has crusted to a reddish-brown, and her mind churns to ketchup left out too long in the sun.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she says, lifting herself off the sheets.

The witch pushes her back down. “Look.” He hands her the x-rays. “The flowers grow in your lungs. You have let them stay there for a long time. It is the Hanahaki, and roots have grown strong in such a fertile garden.”

She traces her finger across the X-ray, looking at the twists and curve the flowers make inside her chest. They are white against blue. Like rivers. Like veins.

Steel ribs, iron screws, all too soft meat. She looks up. “What did this to me?”

“You.” He looks down at her with a heavy brow. The universe’s pain and disappointment pool there, as thick and heavy as day it was made. “What has put it there, and how to remove it, are two questions with the same answer.  But knowing this has grown from pride, I see you will turn from the truth.”

“Tell me,” she pleads. Because she is desperate. Because the flowers hurt worse than anything.

The witch tells her. She does not listen.

* * *

The Reclaimed parts are heavy on her shoulder. Her feet are heavy on her legs. She barely hears as Lynx speaks to her, wishing she could sweep them from her vision entirely.

Two sets of feet scrape across pavement: one light as fae, the other barely making it off the ground. She is past the point of no return now; the witch warned her that if she did not do what needed to be done before the flowers reached her trachea, not even a fancy corporate surgery could save her.

That was three weeks ago.

She barely talks now, can’t between the near constant cough. She has told Lynx that is a reaction to an infected augmentation, and the omnic has never pried. After all, what is there to be done? Even with all her wealth, a Reclaimer cannot afford a doctor.

They speak, and there’s blood in her ears and exhaustion in limbs, but she still finds the time to watch. They are so magnificent, so _alive_ , yet Zarya has not done this, not done what the witch accused her of. She is dying and is not her fault because she does not love what cannot love her back-

Zarya coughs. Her mouth is filled with blood.

It falls out of her in floods, and as she falls to the ground she thinks of how Lynx’s voice first made her feel, before she could describe why. Maybe it was precisely because she was so cloistered from others that the omnic had taken root in her heart—warm, even artificial warmth, left her hooked like the first taste of ambrosia. But her first weakness was also her last: she is empty. Nothing to give. Just like the one who-

Lynx is over her, trying to keep her head from hitting the pavement as she staggers under the force of her own body. The fingers on her wrist feel warm and all too real, and she despises that they have to see her like this. Why couldn’t she have the decency to die alone in her apartment? Why are they holding her like this when she knows it will never be the way she wants?

She hacks again, and petals come out along with the globs of blood. Lynx supports her shoulders, and her eyes roll up, trying to catch one last glimpse of the sky before it all goes.

The sound of the highway buzzes high above them. It makes her think of wings.

“Zarya,” they say, and their voice is strange and quaking. She moves her eyes to them. They are holding in their palm a Tiger Lily—a fully intact bloom, covered in blood and now bits of alveoli too. There is something broken and accusing when they say, “why _… you said nothing._ ”

Zarya opens her mouth, but only coughs out more, her whole body succumbing to the slow reality of suffocation. So they had known what these things were. Well. Could have save one trip to the witch doctor.

She tries. Once, twice, three times before she manages, “you did not love me.”

“ _You never gave me the chance._ ”

If omnics could cry…well, she thinks Lynx wants to. She presses one blood-soaked hand against the side of her face, but there are no more words she can get out. A pink light floats past the two figures laid out in the middle of the road, and a broken chest goes still.


End file.
